LA TRUTHWAS BASED ALONG A STRIP of commercial holdings which, in typical LA mish-mash, lay between the high brick towers of the Firestone Rubber Company and the white frontage of Angels’ Abbey, an up-and-coming mausoleum. He’d been expecting some kind of editorial offices, although he realized that was naïve. There were a few scattered typewriters, tables and chairs, but this was basically a dirt floor workshop filled with machinery most of which looked to be beyond working—apart from the one which was, and then only just. The man tending the thrashing, clacking device with a pair of oilcans held like sixshooters gave a comic start when he noticed them. He was dressed in overalls and was very young and very thin. The straggly beard which he affected only made him look younger and thinner.
“Barbara? Is that really you… ?” They waited as he did the many things required to still the machine. “Almost didn’t recognize you there.” He glanced quizzically at Clark. “What are you up to?”
“I guess you could call it research. This is Clark Gable, by the way. And this is Dale. Dale’s our printer, as you’ve probably gathered. Although he’s got many other jobs here at world headquarters of LA Truth.”
“Editor. Compositor. Delivery boy…”
They both chuckled. It was obviously a well-practiced routine.
Rain still pattered the roof, or dripped into overflowing buckets. They sat around a rickety table and Barbara gave Dale the eight reels of photographs she’d taken at Kisberg’s party—seemed that another of his jobs was photo processor. She explained that Clark was a private detective who’d happened upon some odd events which seemed to have something to do with the invention of the Bechmeir Field. But she didn’t say much else. Maybe, Clark thought, she was just protecting him from whatever was out there. Or more likely she was protecting her sources.
“There are some things we expect to happen tomorrow, and some stuff we hope to find out, which could turn this into the biggest story to hit this state since Julian Pete. What I’m saying, Dale, is I want you to hold working the next edition, and be ready to run with whatever I can get. And quick. Even if it’s only one badly laid sheet.”
Dale nodded. As they talked his eyes lingered for long periods on the vision that Barbara Eshel had become this evening, then drifted over to Clark, and then away from him and back to Barbara Eshel again. Dale was a good-looking kid if you discounted the beard, and he was probably about Barbara’s age. You didn’t have to be a matrimonial private detective to work out that she had him, as Peg Entwistle herself might have put it in her still classy lilt, on toast.
But he wasn’t going to tell Barbara about Peg Entwistle. Not yet anyway. For all that had and hadn’t gone on between him and Peg, he didn’t think he wanted to be the one who put her back on the front pages for all the wrong reasons. Despite what the studios said, there was such a thing as bad publicity. And despite what Peg herself had said, feelie stars really were still people. Some of them were anyway.
Back outside and in the Delahaye, Clark thought for a moment that he saw a pair of headlights on the road behind them. Then they seemed to blink off. He started the motor, pulled slowly around the potholes. Then he took a quick right, turned sharply north along Central Avenue past Sears Roebuck, and took Ninth past the Cabrillo Club in a screech of tires. Then he stopped.
“What was all that about?”
“Nothing.” He checked the rear-view. Either they weren’t being followed, or whoever was following them was good. He pulled back out into the empty road. “So—you and Dale. Are you sweet on each other?”
“Why should we be?”
“No reason, I suppose. Or the same reason as always. Does he make a living, doing what he does back there?”
“Some, but not much. Tomorrow morning he’ll be hauling trolleys in the fruit market.”
“But how about you, Barbara?” “How about what?”
“I mean, like Dale. What else do you do when you’re not changing the world?”
“You really want to know?” “Sure. I’m curious.”
“Many a young lady,” she began, putting on a cutglass accent, “suffers, without even knowing, from a terrible blight on the glorious blossoming of her early teenage years. As she stands at the gateway to womanhood, she finds that the strength of her happy childhood has ebbed away, and yet the poise and resolve of adult femininity still lies tantalizingly out of reach. Her back slumps. Her head droops. She is languid, uncommunicative, and often morose. What this delicate flower of early-blooming womanhood is suffering from, were she to know it, are all the symptoms of Feminine Weakness. And what she needs is Tablon’s Iron Purgative … That, or a good kick up her oh-so-delicate ass.”
“But you don’t write the last bit?”
“You have no idea how much I wish I could. I guess someone has to produce this sort of rubbish—advertising copy pretending to be proper articles. You never think about who it is, though, do you? Not until it’s you. Tablon’s Iron whatsit. That was me. Or The Woman Who Forgot Keep Clean Napkins. Otherwise, the world’d stop turning, right? Actually, I rather enjoyed writing that last one. Pity they edited out the last paragraph. The way I told it, the woman ended up on the street turning tricks. And all because of a sauce stain on one of her napkins.”
She was laughing now, and so was he. They were up on Bunker Hill. Past Edna’s Eats, which was closed and unlit, then a final turn. They were still laughing as they climbed from the Delahaye, and he wondered as he took her arm if he’d drunk more of that endless free Champagne than he’d realized. Or maybe she had. They found the door and took the stairs together, arm in arm. He caught her as she tripped on a ruck in the rug, and turned her around in the process so she was leaning against the wall by her door. She was still chuckling. She smelled rain-wet and womanly, and of Champagne and laughter. She was so beautiful that, even in this dark little rooming house, she almost glowed. This wasn’t the Barbara Eshel who’d aimed a gun at him—or even the one who’d been brandishing that heavy camera in a handbag which she now let drop to the floor. But he’d long known that women were capable of being many things, and often several of them at once. It was the same old mystery which he and a million other men had spent their lives trying to unravel. Never got there, of course. But it didn’t stop you trying.
He could feel her body rising toward him. He could smell the sweet bitterness of her breath. Women were another race, a whole different species. He touched her cheek, traced lobe of her ear, and raised her mouth and covered it with his own. Then he stepped back.
“Goodnight,” he muttered, and felt clumsily for his keys.